Here's the Data
by Patchwork Poltergeist
Summary: You are a scientist. You are also a father. Maintaining the equilibrium between these factors is somewhat problematic.


Here is the data:

You are a scientist.

You have always been a scientist. You graduated college in the single digits. There are more accolades, diplomas, honorary diplomas, peace prizes, and national honors than you can count. (Last check, it bordered the low hundreds.) You re-constructed genomes before most of your peers graduated middle-skool. The peers that managed to graduate, anyhow.

Sixty-percent of your peers never made it to hi-skool. Thirty-five-percent never made it past sixth grade.  
By your twentieth birthday, these numbers grow by an average rate of 8.5% each year.

You used to think it was only a matter of being exceptional. A matter of perspective. To a tall man, everyone is short. To a genius, everyone seems stupid.

But one day, on a whim, you decide to visit your old college library for research purposes and a dose of nostalgia. When you realize the library carries nothing besides reality shows and bloo-ray sets of Floopsy Bloops Shmoopsy, you turn to the scientific journals. Microfiche. Internet articles. Ancient newspapers in the back of the college archives.

You cross-reference data. Experiment. Test and retest. Crunch numbers. Invest in caffeine. For the first time, you look around—really, REALLY look—and realize it's not just you.

People are dumb, and they're getting dumber by the year. Lifespans have shortened. The atmosphere is a cesspool. The only rain you've ever known is acid rain.

When you bring your findings to the government—followed by subsequent meetings with the shadow government—it is admitted that these results are "troubling". They assure you they will do something about it.

The following month, the required average for graduating hi-skool lowers to 40-percent.

You decide to take a very long walk.

The world is dying.

The world is dying _and nobody cares_.

When someone is sick, you call a doctor. As it so happens, you possess eighteen doctorates and a cell phone. You contact your old professors and colleagues. Contact doctors, statisticians, neurologists, sociologists, the microscopic community of illegal ecologists, psychologists, everyone. The top minds in every relevant field.

You assemble a dream team.

You go to work.

One year, it occurs to you that the world can't move forward without a new generation, and to be frank, the coming generations don't look too promising. But that's the whole reason why you do the work, right? To leave behind a better world than you inherited from your forefathers.

That Labor Day weekend, you create a son.

He is **_magnificent_**.

Brilliant.

Beautiful.

There are not enough words in the language to describe him. Even if there were, your expertise was never poetry. (Numbers you understand but words…)

A better human being than Dib Membrane has never walked the earth. Ever. (The blocks arranged into Ouija boards are a somewhat odd, but show excellent motor skills and problem-solving.)

You don't think this feeling could ever be replicated. There could never be another person this amazing.

Two years later, your daughter arrives to prove you wrong. (You can't help suspecting she did it on purpose, somehow.)

You go back to work. You do good work. You add another Nobel to the pile.

Your brilliant son begins to display…eccentricities.

It's a phase. It will pass.

You reverse the radiation and lead poisoning in the water supply.

Your son gets pneumonia while hunting the ghost supposedly haunting the toilet.

The weekend after you repair the ozone layer, you take your children on a weekend trip. You bring a telescope along to show them the cosmos. Your daughter's more interested in her video games, but your son grabs the telescope with both hands and doesn't let go.

You show him Alpha Centauri, Sipica, Polaris, Venus, and Mars (he takes a great interest in the "face" on Mars). It's in the middle of searching together for Rigel—because it would be fun for Dib to find his middle namesake—your son asks if you've ever seen an alien.

You tell him you haven't, and every particle of Dib seems to droop with disappointment. It's crushing.

"...But it's not impossible," you tell him.

Your son's eyes grow so, so wide. As if he could suck the whole of the universe into them, into the supermassive black hole of his wonder. His need to explore. His drive to delve into the wonders of science.

You remember that feeling. You've never been prouder.

Quickly, you also remember to specify that this doesn't mean aliens are lightyears anywhere—ANYwhere—near planet Earth. The distance is too massive to traverse, and any forms of life from beyond the stars would be the stuff of petri dishes, not planetary conquest. When it doesn't quite seem to sink in, you pull out the holographic charts to break down the evidence against flying saucers, crop circles, and all that other pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist nonsense.

Somehow, you doubt any of it will sink in.

But your son is still small and imaginative. One should foster a child's creativity, after all. Five-year-olds believe in imaginary things all the time. It will pass.

Seven years later, your assistant stitches the lacerations in your son's arm after an accident in the garage. You transmit a lecture that night about proper safety in the home. In return, you receive a 20-minute ramble about Bigfoot. That weekend, the belt sander goes into storage.

A month later during Parent Teacher Night, you discover that your son had made a friend! Wonderful!

You are informed in Dib's trademark breathless staccato that his friend is the new immigrant child in Ms. Bitters' class; one of the many, many poor souls who've fallen victim to the toxicity of his native country's environment, if Dib's blurry photos are anything to go by. You wish you knew the little boy's native country. If you knew the place's specific conditions, you could identify the disease. Maybe you've already created a cure for it, somewhere stuffed between the cure for stomach cancer and Lynks disease.

A part of you wants to examine him for yourself, but the child's parents never answer the phone when you call. Busy guardians. You can relate.

It's good for children to have hobbies, and even better to have friends, but lately you can't help but feel a little...concerned.

Very concerned. (Extremely concerned?)

Sleepless nights pouring over Project Blue Book and fairy rings and the Bermuda Triangle are one thing, but last night you discovered a drawing in his room. An alarmingly violent depiction of the foreign child's insides spilling out as the child screams and waves little green stick figure arms in agony.

You ask your son about it.

"It's not a nice way to think about your friends. Or anybody."

He glares. "We are _not_ friends."

You go back to work.

You improve Super Toast and polish the infinite power generator the world doesn't deserve. You host a few global conferences in your home. The United Nations come to an agreement.

Your son creates an enemy.

You wonder if maybe the boys have had a fight. Now that you think about it, your son's become obsessed with the foreign child, ranting about aliens here to ruin the country. Where on earth has this strain of xenophobia come from? Conspiracy forums, perhaps?

Or maybe you're worried over nothing. Maybe it's a game. You hope so. Kids need friends.

You revive the rainforest in October, help murder Santa Claus in December, and bring the megalodon back from extinction in late January.

You hug the megalodon.

It is a mild error.

Well. Cyber arms are more efficient for science anyway.

Two weeks after you solve world hunger(and three days after Foodio 3000's can be found in homes worldwide), your colleagues express worry that you've seemed distracted lately.

It's just supposed to be a brush-off, a dismissive word or two. But once you start talking, you can't stop. The words keep coming. You tell them everything.

The neurosurgeon nods in sympathy. "I know exactly what you mean. My kid's an anti-vaxxer."

"God's sake, man! He's troubled," you tell him, "not crazy."

Much too late, you recall that you've called him insane yourself. Not to his face—never too his face. Thinking out loud. Concerned. It was only concern.

Somehow, that doesn't make it any better.

"Membrane, he literally went to the Crazy House for Boys after that psychotic episode last October. Kinda the prerequisite for crazy, just saying."

Your assistant steps in before you can retort. "When was the last time you went home?"

It was last week, in November.

"...Sir, maybe you should check the calendar."

You do. It's May fifteenth. November was months ago.

But you came back for Gazlene's birthday, right? There'd been an ice cream cake shaped like one of those delightful creatures with the exploding intestines from her video games. Was that a physical visit or a holo-screen? Suddenly you're not sure.

"Maybe," your assistant suggests, "you should go home for a while."

You're on the cusp of finishing the Membracelet™. It's the finest thing you've headlined since P.E.G. There's still so much work to do, but…

"Yes. Maybe I should."

Your schedule reconfigures. Family breakfast in the morning. Work from home until Skool ends. Family bonding time at seven (Dib makes it there roughly 57% of the time, which is better than you anticipated). Work from home after your children go to bed.

Three weeks after the shift, the lab contacts you. You're needed back to oversee preliminary testing procedures for the bracelet and no, you can't holo-commute. Of course you can't. If Membracelets™ were powered by rats or monkey-zombies, perhaps, but when working with humans, other humans must be present.

You buy the Blarpshucks franchise on the corner. You open a second Membrane Labs. There to home in a brisk walk, with some bonus exercise you've missed out on using the matter transporter all these years.

Your son's been spending a lot of time in his room lately. Even for him. You don't see him at breakfast. Your daughter says she doesn't see him leave at night

When you finally ask him about it, he tells you that he "can't leave his post" and to just slide his meals through the door. Does he sleep? He certainly hasn't bathed in quite some time.

Come to think of it, you haven't seen the green child in a while, either. That would explain it; the child's gone on a summer trip. No friends to visit.

In the meantime, your son pours over his computer monitors and data scrolls, occasionally typing out the odd note here and there.

Observation is key to the scientific process. Baby steps, but steps in the right direction nonetheless. You've always prided yourself in your optimism.

You decide it best to leave him to his work.  
You return to yours.

And then.

One muggy night in early August, you go to sleep.

You have a dream like none you've ever had before. Of tractor beams and starscapes. Of dank prisons and tiny purple mooses. Little green men that scream a lot. Littler green dogs riding shotgun on donkeys. The best cup of tea you've ever had. A reality-warping hole cleaving the soft flesh of space and time. Escheresque landscapes curling into the stratosphere and lined with miles and miles of robots wearing uniforms…

Uniforms from YOUR laboratory.

And your son…

Your son claws amongst the throng of mechanical men. Overwhelmed. Drowning in a sea of metal bodies. He fights with all his strength, _oh_, but he's just a little boy. For all his resilience and magnificence and genius and skill, he's still an eleven-year-old boy.

_Your_ boy, who needs you now. Who always did.

Cracked and broken, the world floats past you in the weak gravity. As you watch them go by, two points of data become clear:

1) Your job is to save and protect the world. That is your ONLY job. Nothing supersedes it.  
2) Your children are your world.

You roll up your sleeves. You go to work.

It's all a dream, of course. That doesn't mean it's not real.

The purpose of dreaming is for the brain to rearrange and contextualize what the subconscious already knows through metaphors, symbolism and such.

Nothing comes of a dream unless one acts upon it. One can wish for plutonium all day, but that won't make it materialize in one's lap.

Action=Reaction.  
Reaction=Change.

Wishes aren't scientific. Wishing gets no results. And you've wasted over a decade on wishes. It's time to rectify that.

Final Observation:

It is 9:13 on a Tuesday morning. Temperature approx. 79 degrees, humidity 40%. Smog at 1%.

Your beloved daughter is here. Your son is here as well, and for the first time in a long time, he's smiling. Dib has a wonderful smile.

(You're not sure what the bulbous orange gentleman is doing here, but you find yourself oddly pleased to see him, too.)

For the first time in years, the Membrane family share a physical breakfast together at the table.

Also, the green child is at the window clutching the clown puppy statue your apprentice bought you for Christmas. The child screeches. This is his prefered method of communication. Some people just need to know they're heard.

You wish him a good morning because it is. It truly is.

(You kind of liked that clown puppy he stole, though. Oh well.)


End file.
